SOURCE: "Elizabethan Drama," in Lamb's Criticism: A Selection from the Literary Criticism of Charles Lamb, edited by E. M. W. Tillyard, 1923. Reprint by Greenwood Press, 1970, pp. 18-19.

In the following excerpt from an essay written between 1820 and 1825, Lamb offers brief commentary on Marston's Antonio and Mellida and What You Will,

Title page of the 1602 edition of The History of Antonio and Mellida.

comparing the former to Shakespeare's King Lear.]

Antonio and Mellida. The situation of Andrugio and Lucio, in the first part of this tragedy, where Andrugio Duke of Genoa banished his country, with the loss of a son supposed drowned, is cast upon the territory of his mortal enemy the Duke of Venice, with no attendants but Lucio an old nobleman, and a page—resembles that of Lear and Kent in that king's distresses. Andrugio, like Lear, manifests a kinglike impatience, a turbulent greatness, an affected resignation...